Conner led on the penultimate leg. Onboard Australia II’s tender Black Swan Bond, his right-hand man Warren Jones and other syndicate bigwigs had drifted down from the flybridge as they watched Bertrand trail Conner for five legs. Only Australia II’s designer Ben Lexcen stayed up top, chin resting on his chest, watching this fourth Bond challenge seemingly going the way of the previous three. In 1974, 1977 and 1980. Then Lexcen stirred and sat more upright. Bertrand, and his tactician Hugh Treharne, split from Liberty. A roll of the dice or seeing breeze coming down the course, which wasn’t there when Liberty rounded the top mark? It doesn’t matter. From the wings of the downwind leg the boats gybed and started to converge. Lexcen sensed the Aussies had gained.
Bond and others rejoined him on the flybridge. Libertyand Australia
II were going to be close, very close or – dare they think it – could Bertrand’s crew even cross ahead? The possibility became a probability and then a certainty. Having got inside of their opponent in better pressure as they led away from the mark, Conner’s crew watched their 49-second advantage turn against them. A big lead had become a slender deficit.
Left: the moment the ‘old’ Cup ended and the new one began, as Australia II wins the seventh race of the 1983 Match – both crews exhausted after tacking 47 times on the last beat. For Alan Bond (above) it was the culmination of four challenges and a result that would see him welcomed into boardrooms around the world
CONTENTIOUS, YES… A GIANT, BEYOND DOUBT – Tim Jeffery
It was almost as if the past 32 years hadn’t happened. The New York Yacht Club waited three days to issue a statement about Alan Bond’s death. Still, it seemed, Bondy remained a thorn in the side of the east coast institution. The club probably sensed its words would be parsed and analysed, yet knew its view on life’s end for the man who halted its own 132-year iron grip on the famous trophy was being sought. ‘The New York Yacht Club acknowledges with regret the passing of Australian yachtsman Alan Bond, a persistent four-time challenger and 1983 winner of the America’s Cup.’
Persistent. Yup, that was Bond, alright. He was also good fun, street smart, fiercely competitive, determined, undiminished in his thirst for deal-making and with a moral compass that got him into trouble from childhood.
In one lifetime he was both Australia’s biggest national hero with Australia II’s victory in 1983 and its largest corporate fraudster, spend- ing four years in prison for a AUS$1.2 billion defrauding of Bell Resources as he attempted to keep his ailing Bond Corp afloat. He was convicted several times for other corporate offences and, just as the Bond name stood high and proud above a tower block in Perth’s St George’s Street, so others detested the sight of it, not least of whom were shareholders and pensioners of companies Bond had quite literally raided.
But let’s remember the moment when the America’s Cup changed for ever.
It was Race 7 of the 25th Match. The score was tied 3:3. To reach that point Australia II had lost the opening races with a headboard collapse and a steering failure. Skipper John Bertrand was squaring up eye to eye with Dennis Conner in his full pomp and coming off the worse for it.
Conner, Tom Whidden and the brainstrust behind the defender
Liberty used every ruse in their AC playbook and every ounce of their vast capital of skill and knowledge to keep the red defender in front of the fast, white Australian pointer with her winged keel and vertical cut sails. One ploy was for Liberty to have multiple certificates through- out the match, with the boat duly set up with different ballast and sail- area configurations for each race day’s conditions. And yet the boat with the winged keel, which the NYYC had been within an ace of denying her chance to race in the Cup, and which was faster and more nimble than Liberty, almost didn’t win.
In a final throw of the dice Conner tacked Liberty 47 times on the final upwind leg, trying to break Bertrand down. He even carted the Australians off into the spectator fleet. But, eventually, the faster boat won by 41 seconds. So ended 132 years of American dominance. It was the pivotal moment in the America’s Cup’s long and fabulous story.
In those days Thames Street, Newport was America’s Cup Central. The wharfs at Bowen’s, Bannister’s and Williams & Manchester’s were pretty much open house during Cup summers, the Twelves hanging in their single-point hoists. Australia II’s compound was a little different. It was a bit more security conscious. Above all, there were skirts around Australia II’s hull, and a big plywood box that housed her mid-body when she was raised from the water; so the buzz about the secret keel started pretty much as soon as Australia II was launched.
As the victorious Aussie crew returned to a rapturous welcome after vanquishing Liberty, the cat was about to be let out of the box. Bond was the perfect ringmaster. ‘Show us the keel! Show us the keel!’ demanded the crowds. Bond, in green Puffa waistcoat and Adidas green and gold team gear, pumped them up into even more of a frenzy until the first challenger ever to win the Cup was finally raised out of the water.
The secret keel, the NYYC’s nemesis, was now public property; narrow at the root instead of the foot, and sprouting not merely tiplets (which the British had tried) but whacking great big lead wings. Wings so large that people could climb on them for photos amid the wild celebrations.
‘Lead wings?’ had been the astonished reaction of Dennis Conner shortly before the match when a worker who had blocked off the Aussie 12 Metre at Barrington Cove boatyard had become the first outsider apart from IYRU’s (ISAF’s predecessor) measurers to see the mysterious keel.
The Americans spent months trying to find out what Ben Lexcen had created in the more radical appendages of a hull form shared with another Aussie challenger, the conventional Challenge-12. The rules in 1983 required both the designer and yacht to meet nationality requirements. Sounds good, but it wasn’t a great rule as Liberty’s own designer Johan Valentijn proved by regularly switching passports between Cups to secure work. There was recognition too that top-grade test tanks existed in very few countries, so they were exempt from the nationality rule.
And so Lexcen tested in the Netherlands, with Peter van Oossanen of the Netherlands Ship Model Basin and Joop Sloof of the National Aeronautical Laboratory playing key roles. Lexcen tried several different keel designs, including the inverted keel to boost righting moment. It worked but produced a lot of drag. The idea for wings came from scientific papers, notably by Boeing’s Richard Whitcomb, who’d advocated wings to control turbulence.
Wings were added to the inverted keel, tried and tested. Drag was down; performance up.
It should have been no surprise that the New York Yacht Club treated Bond with the utmost suspicion. But their efforts to outfox or outlaw
SEAHORSE 9
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